This is Life (8 page)

‘Now, get ready. I’m going to take my foot off the brake. After three: one . . . two . . . three . . .’ Lucien translated as she went along. She lifted her foot, but for all
their pushing the car didn’t move forward. She braked again, before it had a chance to roll back. ‘We’ll try again. One . . . two . . . three . . .’ Again, the car
wouldn’t move. A line of traffic was starting to build up behind them. They just had to get it to the brow of the hill, where the road widened, and the other cars would be able to pass. Her
boss could arrange to have it towed from there. She looked in her wing mirror, and saw Aurélie trudging up towards them. ‘Hey,’ she called. ‘Give us a push.’

Aurélie stuck her cigarette in the corner of her mouth, wedged Herbert’s buggy against a lamppost so it wouldn’t roll down the hill, and joined the gang at the back of the
car. Together they pushed, and at last the car began to crawl upwards. A pair of passers-by joined in, and two minutes later it was tucked in at the side of the road at the top of the hill.
Everyone was elated at having come through a crisis. Madame Akiyama announced that she hadn’t had so much fun in decades, and even Monsieur Akiyama allowed himself a smile of
satisfaction.

Sylvie hadn’t seen Aurélie for two weeks. Never having been a great one for metropolitan reserve, she gave her an enthusiastic hug. She introduced her to the Akiyamas, and then
Lucien. ‘You don’t have to worry about him hitting on you, because he’s obsessed with Japanese girls.’

‘Not
girls
, not any more. Just one girl,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ clarified Sylvie. ‘Just one girl he’s never met.’

Aurélie thought it was a shame that he was an obsessive deviant. She could have done with someone to put his arms around her, and he was good-looking, in a gawky kind of way, and he
seemed nice enough. Herbert could have benefited from a father figure for the next few days as well. But this was typical. She had grown quite used to not having much luck with men. Unlike Sylvie,
she wasn’t looking for a husband, not yet at least, but a boyfriend would have been nice.

When it was Madame Akiyama’s turn to be introduced to Aurélie, she said something in Japanese, which Lucien translated.

‘She says you have a very adorable child.’

Aurélie smiled, vicariously flattered by the compliment. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She looked down, hoping that Herbert had taken the praise graciously. She turned white. He
wasn’t there. She looked around, and there was no Herbert to be seen. She had completely forgotten that she had left him wedged against a lamppost somewhere down the hill. ‘Oh shit
–
Air-bear!
I mean, oh shit – Herbert!’ She ran back down the hill. ‘Herbert!’ she cried. ‘Herbert!’

Air-bear?
thought Sylvie, remembering that Aurélie had indeed been pushing some kind of cart. She hadn’t given much thought to it at the time, she had just wanted her to
hurry up and start helping with the car.
I wonder what that’s all about
.

The Akiyamas looked disconcerted by these events. Sylvie came to Aurélie’s rescue, and told Lucien to inform them that forgetting you’ve left your baby halfway down a hill is
normal for France.

He obliged, and they seemed to accept this. They all waited for her to return.

A small crowd had gathered around the buggy, and Herbert was charming them with a sequence of amusing faces as they tried to work out what they ought to do with the abandoned
child. They were starting to debate various possibilities when Aurélie arrived, out of breath.

‘Ah,’ she said to the baby. ‘There you are.’ Everyone stared at her as she puffed and panted. ‘He’s always running off,’ she explained. They kept
staring at her. ‘Come along, Herbert,’ she said.

‘
Air-bear
?’ said one of the onlookers.

‘No – Herbert. H-H-H. Herbert. Say after me:
H
erber
t
.’

They all had a go at pronouncing his name. Some did better than others, but none of them came close to getting it right. Even though they still had so much to learn, Aurélie decided to
cut the lesson short. She wasn’t about to go rooting through her bag for her mirror.

‘Very good, everyone,’ she lied. ‘Now say goodbye to all your nice new friends, Herbert.’

Herbert crossed his eyes and blew a bubble, and the crowd of onlookers waved and wished him well.

As Aurélie fumbled with the buggy, they started talking among themselves, as if she wasn’t there.

Air-bear? Isn’t that an English name? He doesn’t look English to me. He looks just like his mother, and she’s definitely not English – maybe the poor girl married an
Englishman. I had a cousin who did that . . .

She left them to it, and made her way back up the hill.

To Monsieur Akiyama’s dismay, Madame Akiyama had insisted on buying everybody a drink, and after reporting the broken-down car to an embattled boss, they sidestepped the
crowds of the Place du Tertre and made their way to a backstreet restaurant where they sat together under a gas heater in the courtyard, exchanging questions about each other’s homelands and
ways of life. Sylvie had a cup of coffee, and Aurélie had a glass of wine. She popped Herbert on her lap, and gave him some grapes and a bottle of milk. When he had had enough, she handed
him over to a delighted Madame Akiyama, who bounced him on her knee as Aurélie sketched the pair of them. She gave one sketch to the Akiyamas and kept another for her project.

When she could contain her curiosity no longer, Sylvie asked Madame Akiyama if she could see a picture of her now legendary daughter. Monsieur Akiyama was not delighted about this, but his wife
gladly pulled out her phone, selected a photo and handed it to her. Sylvie could see at once where Lucien was coming from. Akiko was lovely, and you really did only need one picture to tell. Her
skin, her smile, her eyes: everything about her was just right.

‘She’s beautiful,’ she said, and Lucien gladly passed this on. ‘May we see some more?’

Madame Akiyama agreed, and Lucien leaned over Sylvie’s shoulder as she looked through the album. There was Akiko petting a small dog, Akiko beside a lake, Akiko in a restaurant . . . With
each new photograph Lucien let out a gasp, a sigh, a moan or a whimper. ‘It’s official,’ whispered Sylvie. ‘You love her. And I can completely see why.’ She continued
scrolling through the photographs until disaster struck. There she was, the lovely Akiko, standing in what looked like a forest. This would have been fine, had it not been for the fact that beside
her stood a young man, his arm resting around her shoulder. And this was not just any young man; he was a young man so handsome it was unbearable. He looked like an old school movie star.

Lucien buried his face in his hands. He tried not to cry. As well as learning the language, he had studied Japanese manners, and he knew that breaking down in front of the father of the woman
you hoped to marry was considered a sign of weakness in their culture. As he held back the tears it struck him that breaking down in front of the father of the woman you hoped to marry was probably
considered a sign of weakness all over the world – except in England, where that kind of thing was positively encouraged.

It was Sylvie who spoke. ‘And who is this?’ she asked Madame Akiyama.

Lucien was only just able to utter a translation, but when Madame Akiyama replied, his face radiated joy. ‘It’s Akiko’s brother, Toshiro.’ He turned back to the woman he
hoped would one day be his mother-in-law. ‘Madame Akiyama, why didn’t you tell me you had a son?’

‘You only asked us if we had a daughter.’

‘Oh.’ He turned red. She was right, of course.

Sylvie was no longer listening. She was scrolling through Madame Akiyama’s photo collection, looking for more pictures of Toshiro. There were plenty. She was able to study him from a
number of angles. After a long silence, she looked up. ‘You have wonderful children,’ she said to Monsieur and Madame Akiyama.

They accepted this, Monsieur Akiyama with a nod, and Madame Akiyama with a smile.

F
or the run-up to his latest presentation of
Life
, Le Machine had taken an unremarkable apartment on rue Eugène Carrière. He
hadn’t visited the place before moving in, but his manager had shown him a list of available properties, and the moment he saw the name of the street he had known this was the one, and had
instructed her to rent it for him. Eugène Carrière was his favourite artist.

The apartment had been his base for the weeks leading up to the opening night, weeks he had spent in quiet contemplation and physical and dietary preparation. He had spent as much time as he could walking the streets, reacquainting himself with the city upon which he had turned his back. Apart from a
single case containing clothes, all he had brought to the apartment was a set of dumb-bells and a print of Carrière’s painting
Enfant avec casserole
. He had had it enlarged to
fifty times the size of the small original, and the huge canvas leaned against the bedroom wall. The first thing he had done on arrival was to go through the apartment and take down all the
pictures that had been hanging there: the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Coeur, Béatrice Dalle, and other such famous sights that the holidaymakers who usually rented the place would have
been delighted to see on the wall. Now this huge baby, sitting in the shadows as he scooped the scrapings from an overturned pot, was the only adornment in an otherwise spartan bedroom.

It had been the work of Eugène Carrière that had made him want to pick up a paintbrush, and his earliest efforts had been attempts to emulate Carrière’s style,
particularly his use of colour, which many described as monochromatic, but not Le Machine – he saw whole worlds within the browns and greys. After years of trying, he had given up. One day he
had made a split-second decision and left Carrière alone in his twilit world. He knew he had to find his own way, which he had done, and this was how he had come to be lying naked on a mat
on the floor while a woman he had met just twenty minutes earlier waxed every hair from his body.

The first time he had presented
Life
he had shaved off his body hair beforehand, but he now preferred waxing. It took longer for the hairs to grow back, and when they did they were less
abrasive than stubble. For the course of the show he would begin to shave every third day once the hair had reached an appropriate length, using an electric razor that collected the bristles, which
would then be transferred into a jar. The woman worked on in silence, smearing on the wax and ripping it off. It was not an enjoyable experience but it would soon be over, and he had become used to
it.

The last time he had been waxed like this had been around nine months earlier, shortly after he had returned to London from his last show, which had been in São Paolo. That had been when
his current batch of promotional photographs had been taken, after which he had allowed his hair to grow back. The city was full of the chosen picture from that shoot, in the Métro and on
bus shelters. He had been walking past himself several times a day.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about getting ready to present
Life
once again. He loved what he had created, and was in no doubt about its power to move the people who came to see it,
but he had begun to find keeping the secret behind it to be an unbearable burden. It took more and more strength to stop himself from blurting it out in interviews, or even from the stage, telling
the world what it was all about. There was also the problem that there was no longer anything new about it. The first time he had done it, it had been like taking a voyage upriver into an unknown
land, but now there were no surprises, and there was a very real danger that the show would become stale, for him and for the people who came to see it.

He felt it was unrealistic of people to expect an artist to remain at the top of their game year after year, decade after decade. People repeat themselves, retreating into the comfort of
familiar patterns, or they simply lose their grip on whatever it was that had once made their work great, and he didn’t see why he would be any different. He only hoped he would have the
self-awareness to realise when that was happening to him, or better still to withdraw before the rot even began to set in. He was determined not to outstay his welcome, to kill off
Life
before it lost its power.

Every time,
Life
had unfolded in the same way, and so far Paris had not deviated from the template. He avoided reading about himself in newspapers, but his manager had yawned as she told
him that, as with everywhere else, campaigners for public decency had been trying to force the mayor to close them down before they had even opened, but even so it had been allowed to go ahead.
These campaigners always generated incredible amounts of free publicity and strong advance bookings, and his manager always worried that there
wouldn’t
be an outcry from their host
city’s upstanding citizens.

It had helped their cause that they had been able to draw the city authorities’ attention to their having arranged for
Life
to take place in an area that was known for its
risqué goings-on. Nobody could reasonably claim to have been enjoying a wholesome stroll with their family when they happened to pop into an innocent-looking art exhibition at Le Charmant
Cinéma Érotique only to be confronted with a naked man squatting over glassware.

While not quite daring to call for a ban, conservative newspapers were already running articles critical of the nature of the exhibition, most of it synthesised outrage written by people whose
stock-in-trade was synthe-sised outrage, none of whom had been to see any of Le Machine’s previous exhibitions. A lukewarm debate, based on absolute misunderstandings of the piece, had been
running in their letters pages about what does or doesn’t (even should or shouldn’t) count as art. As ever, nobody in any corner of the press had come out firmly in favour of
Life
: the closest the event had to support were a few articles adopting a let’s-wait-and-see stance.